Merce Me

At the Joyce, Karole Armitage was showing her Cunningham roots; uptown at City Center, Paul Taylor dipped into his back pages.

Post-punk: Dancers Valerie Madonia and William Isaac in Armitage's Time Is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood.

(Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Karole Armitage is 49 now. She no longer blazes hell-bent across the stage in her own choreography, she’s quit cranking up her music to total-annihilation decibels, and since 1989, she’s spent most of her time in Europe. In short, she’s handed in her title as downtown’s punk ballerina. But when she unveiled her latest work with the ad hoc company she calls Armitage Gone! Dance at the Joyce earlier this month, there was no mistaking who was in charge. Armitage grew up in ballet, then became a prized Merce Cunningham dancer; her choreographic style was forged in the rigor shared by both traditions. You see technique, you see horsepower, and you see plenty of attitude—her favorite decorative element. In the new, hourlong piece, the dancers slash their way through exaggerated splits, sky-high extensions, and deliberately ostentatious posturing, glowing every moment in a hard, gold light. It’s Cunningham more than anything else, but it’s Cunningham that’s been through the fiery furnace.

Time Is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood (the title comes from a poem by Philip Larkin and probably should have stayed there) takes place in a wonderfully arresting space created by the artist David Salle and the lighting designer Clifton Taylor. The stage is hung on three sides with curtains made of trembling, shimmering chains that fly out when the dancers pass through them, as if to suggest that some sort of magic lurks in the mysterious border between dancing and not-dancing. The company is made up of a dozen dancers of wildly different sizes, shapes, and backgrounds, including several described as “self-taught.” They tend to emerge and disperse in waves, yet each performer works most often in fierce solitude, even in the midst of duets or group passages. Movement is frequently wielded like a weapon here: Many of the duets are bouts of pure combat, though the dancers seem fixed on attacking the music, not each other. In quieter sections of the piece, it’s a relief to see partnering that describes a relationship rather than a coincidence.

“Many of the duets are bouts of pure combat, though the dancers seem fixed on attacking the music, not each other.”

Armitage has spiked the choreography with bits of yoga, bharata natyam, and voguing, but of these only the last, with its defiant self-consciousness, slips into place as if it belongs there. Yoga and bharata natyam are about transcendence; they’re techniques that reach to a state beyond exertion, and there’s nothing in the well-organized frenzy of Armitage’s work that doesn’t relish the superficial as an end in itself. This quality is exacerbated by the fact that she’s oddly unmusical. The piece moves from Bartók to the contemporary composers Gavin Bryars and Annie Gosfield, and ends with Ives’s The Unanswered Question, but only the most obvious qualities of the music seem to interest her. A punk sensibility doesn’t provide much of a training ground for depth or nuance. Armitage has moved well beyond her days of rebel chic, but she seems unwilling to take the next, riskier step—to quit demanding an audience’s attention, and start earning it.